Museums quotes

Museums

594 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

594 quotes

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Browse quotes that often appear alongside museums — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

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Museums quotes (page 4 of 30)

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Virginia Woolf Novelist
Museums

"I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh."

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Robert Hughes Art Critic, Author
Museums

"An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had."

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Italo Svevo Novelist
Museums

"And it is true that life lacks the monotony of museums. There come days which seem worthy of being framed, but they are so full of conflicting sounds, of line and color and living, burning light that they never become tedious."

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John Green Author, YouTuber
Museums

"The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around."

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Charles Darwin Naturalist, Geologist
Museums

"The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals."

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Bill Gates Business Magnate, Philanthropist
Museums

"Exposure to the reproductions [of Corbis-owned fine art photographs] is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for the real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries."

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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Museums

"I gather that a lot of the "pots" in the great museum in Baghdad, which we allowed to be looted and then gutted, are now for sale to the highest bidder on the art and archeology black market. This is good capitalism, I guess, while a museum, being a public trust and accessible to all, is anticapitalist, pretty damn near socialist in fact."

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Theaster Gates Artist, professor
Museums

"The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding."

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Sarah Unknown
Museums

"No matter that I have inhibitions enough to fill all my pockets; I keep trying , hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed."

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Orhan Pamuk Novelist, Screenwriter
Museums

"After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?"

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist, Science Communicator
Museums

"If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs."

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Mark Twain Writer, Humorist
Museums

"Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market."

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Kiki Smith Artist
Museums

"It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically."

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Emma Watson Actress, Activist
Museums

"If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn't last very long. I can't go to a museum - I'll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of... it's sort of like a domino effect."

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